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There's a great book about all of this, "Against Intellectual Monopoly." [1] There's an interesting bit about the English/American writer thing you mention, specifically Dickens. From chapter two: The amount of revenues British authors received up front
from American publishers often exceeded the amount they
were able to collect over a number of years from
royalties in the UK. Notice that, at the time, the US
market was comparable in size to the UK market.
More broadly, the lack of copyright protection, which
permitted the United States publishers’ “pirating” of
English writers, was a good economic policy of great
social value for the people of United States, and of no
detriment, as the Commission report and other evidence
confirm, for English authors. Not only did it enable the
establishment and rapid growth of a large and successful
publishing business in the United States; also, and more
importantly, it increased literacy and benefited the
cultural development of the American people by flooding
the market with cheap copies of great books. As an
example: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol sold for six cents
in the US, while it was priced at roughly two dollars
and fifty cents in England. This dramatic increase in
literacy was probably instrumental for the emergence of
a great number of United States writers and scientists
toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Arguments about intellectual property now seem to always focus on the ability of the author to make money, and not about the basic reason that the concept of IP was created: it was a gift from society to creators to both help them and encourage the enrichment of society at large. The dramatic rise in UGC demonstrates that 'creators gonna create' anyway, so the deal makes less and less sense for society to keep up.There's also a part in the book about the steam engine stuff, too, but this is already getting long... 1: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h... |